Kyustendil, 1953
Born in Kyustendil, he studied fresco/mural and monumental art at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia under Dimo Zaimov (graduated 1980). In 1986, he participated in the first exhibition of the pioneering artistic group “The City.” In 1995 he received a fellowship to work at the Cité des Arts in Paris. A sculptor and painter, Blazhev now creates paintings, installations, and monumental sculptures. He began with realism but soon turned to expressionism (referencing the Blue Rider group and children’s art), later moving to abstraction (abstract expressionism), and eventually to installations. He is preoccupied with material textures (stone, fabric, etc.), motifs such as the circle, and the interplay of horizontal and vertical elements. He has exhibited in more than two hundred solo and group shows in Bulgaria. In 1999, he became the youngest living artist to be honored with a retrospective at the National Gallery of Bulgaria. A decade later, in 2009, another major retrospective of his work was hosted there. In 2023, the Grafikart Gallery in Sofia organized a large exhibition entitled ‟Models and Drawings*. His works are held in the National Gallery of Bulgaria, the Sofia City Gallery, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Giulio Andreotti collection in Rome, the Art Griffin Foundation in the USA, among others. He has received the Ilia Bejkov Painting Prize (1984), the Zlatyu Boyadzhiev Fine Arts Prize (1987), the Grand Prize of the Triennale of Realistic Painting (1987), the Vladimir Dimitrov Prize—the country’s highest painting award from the Union of Bulgarian Artists (2013), among others. He has also been decorated with the First-Class Medal of Saints Cyril and Methodius.